I’ve recently started testing some Varnish settings and I’m finding that with GTMetrix, my website is loading FASTER without Varnish enabled. I was under the impression that the site would be faster WITH Varnish enabled?

I don’t use varnish for the same reasons. My perfect optimization setup for wordpress:

HTTP/2 enabled,

Very light Autoptimize optimizations for javascript and css to minimize request (if you’ll overdo it will actually slow a little bit down your website)

WP Super Cache

No Varnish

PHP 7.0 or higher

It has been tested on many different website, which all load pretty much all around the world in under 2 seconds. If the server is close enough to the testing point and no heavy duty plugins enabled then under 1 second load time is possible.

hi @batey, I actually had the discussion in the live chat and basically told them that my site was getting faster page load times without Varnish vs having it enabled. They made some tweaks on the server side and that was all that I did.

I had a site that was miserably slow due to an older programmer and honestly couldn’t be bothered to uncode and recode it, with varnish on, it went from 17 seconds to load to 2 seconds. So varnish definitely works, you just need to make sure your site is actually using it and clearing out the relevant expired content.

Thanks for having a healthy conversation folks. I only would like to add that Varnish is a great tool and it can do wonders if configured properly. Each site has different structure and one standard Varnish setting can not be applied on every site.
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